Neighbors of the 1,000-acre Inglewood oil field in Los Angeles have expressed concern about the possible impacts they believe fracking could visit upon them.
“Even if the impacts aren’t as large as other areas, places like Baldwin Hills tell us you could still have huge impacts on people and communities,” Nagami said at the GRA symposium. “Even small seismic events or drinking water impacts could still cause a disruption in people’s lives.”
Fracking is a concern in areas where groundwater is the sole source of local drinking water supplies. In an Aug. 2 commentary published in the Santa Ynez Valley News, Bob Field, president of the Santa Ynez Rancho Estates Mutual Water Company in Santa Barbara County, wrote that the small amounts of chemicals used in fracking pose a threat to water quality. “Only one gallon of their ‘only 1 percent’ solution could contaminate up to 1 million gallons of ground water – and each fracking process uses on the order of a million gallons of these toxic solutions,” Field wrote. “Fracking fluids should not be allowed to contain any toxic chemicals. If it is not lawful for a chemical to be in groundwater, it should not be lawful to inject it into the ground.”
This issue of Western Water looks at hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in California, with information presented at GRA’s inaugural symposium on groundwater and energy.
An Unconventional Recovery Method Though not new in California, fracking has gained greater inter- est because of expanding efforts of using it to get at the large amount of crude oil in the geologic formations of
Monterey Shale, which runs the length of the San Joaquin Valley and coastal hills and is also found between Santa Barbara and Orange County. Fracking enhances the permeability of the formation so that oil can be pumped to the surface. “We have a lot of crude oil here that is locked up in Monterey Shale,” said Murray Einarson, a hydrogeologist with Haley and Aldrich in Walnut Creek.
Oil well fracking in California involves seeking oil from Monterey Shale, a large geologic formation in which experts say billions of barrels of oil lie. “There is a tremendous amount of energy that is potentially available to California in the Monterey formation,” Hull said. So much oil exists in Monterey Shale that it could replace all of California’s foreign imports for 43 years at the current consumption rate, according to WSPA.
Fracking is a necessary part of energy development because “we will need oil for a long time,” said Hull. “We are dealing with two larger social movements,” he said. “One, we need to get off petroleum and two, we need to find alternative energy. What’s missing is a realistic timeframe to get there.”
What is known is California’s
prodigious use of gasoline – 43 million gallons each day. “We are an enormous user of energy in California, the third largest on the face of the Earth,” Hull said. Fracking is largely taking place in Kern County, “where there is not a lot of groundwater.”
Slightly more than half of the people surveyed in California have heard about fracking and among those, 42 percent favor its use and 46 percent oppose it and 12 percent don’t know,
Read the 2011 California Oil and Gas Report Production Statistics, www.consrv.ca.gov/dog
Example of Hydraulic Fracturing for Shale Development
Source: Water Education Foundation September/October 2012 7